“Upon crossing a summer field you may be surrounded by the unmistakable sound of a swarm of crickets; it is a very spatial experience as the sound appears to be moving with you. Crickets do indeed respond to the physical presence of an intruder by
suddenly stopping their characteristic rubbing of wings, which produces the well known sound. It is, we shall say, a very material kind of sound as it is the product of a physical pattern of movement articulated in space and time. Not only but the tonality of the sound is directly influenced by the age and size of the animal as well as by its location in relationship to the listener and the consistency of the grasses and flowers that may constitute the field’s green carpet. This complex set of dynamic relationships in space and time ends up producing a pattern of material sounds that we instantly recognize as characteristic of crickets”.
from the original project description for Archilab 9 Catalogue.
ecoLogicStudio’s meta-Folly, commissioned by the FRAC Centre in Orleans and now part of its world renowned permanent collection, is a sonic pavilion which aims to embody into architecture the spatio-temporal vibrations that we perceive as living nature. This is achieved by means of a playful perceptual game with the listener, triggering the development of a new meta-language of architecture, based on material experience, patterns recognition as well as a real-time responsiveness.
Meta-Folly demonstrates that this can be achieved with the sole use of cheap and ready made materials reassembled and activated by means of digital computation. The project thus explores the other frontier of the bio-digital paradigm, where the
biologic component does not literally inhabit architecture but it is materialized in the interaction between human and artificial components.
In its essence the meta-Folly can be understood as a field of digitally materialized sensitivity which agitates, via electrical stimuli, a proliferation of 300 piezo-buzzer analogically modulated in 4 different tones. Programmed to operate at variable frequency, the buzzer react to the speed of visitors’ movements around the Folly, developing ripples of sound that bounce back and forth until dissolution, synchronisation or complete interference. The convolutedness of the geometry produces the emergence of unique sonic niches to be decoded by the human ears inside the Folly.
reach is extended by the sensitivity of its 6 hubs, equipped with proximity sensors and able to capture the public’s presence at a distance of up to 5 meters; this means that the overall footprint of the folly extends up to an area of 12 x 12 meters.
Computational cyber-artificiality here challenges our assumptions of what constitutes the boundary between the natural and the artificial realms; as an architectural prototype the Folly is completely synthetic, yet we perceive it as akin to a complex living system composed of multiple interacting living organisms. In this sense the project can be said to offer a version of Arcadia that is embodied in a completely abstract, mathematical and synthetic model of its original.
The project therefore draws the line of a future convergence of cybernetics and environmental psychology, digital computational design and craftsmanship, radical ecosystemic thinking: it is a prototype for architecture in the age of the Anthropocene. The outcome may be an improbable assemblage of urban paraphernalia (recycled polypropylene, hacked sound kits, steel rods, chameleonic nano-flakes) but within it we found a new aesthetic and spatial milieu, a new form of material life.
The architectural precedent for this project is found in the tradition of the folly within the playful English landscape gardens where architecture becomes a device to establish a new relationship with the natural context; among the many kind of follies
the “grotto” was certainly one of the most intriguing types. Typically accessed from the water, the grotto was an immersive environment faking the spatial effects of a natural cave and reproducing the exoticism of the Mediterranean. Light and sound reflections where playing a crucial role in amplifying the intimacy of the visitors and stimulating more intense interactions. Only this time it is not the distant memory of a romantic trip in the Mediterranean to inspire the behaviour of meta-Folly, rather the attempt to find in the grey artificiality of the urban and in the abstraction of the computational, a new naturalness.
There is no escaping the fact that trashing is a necessary condition of our urban society, one that far exceeds the conventional notion of wasting; urban trash incorporates a multi-layered assemblage of products, landscapes, media content, attitudes and lifestyles. We can re-engineer trash, we can re-cycle trash or we can prevent trash to be produced; but with this project we made an attempt to accept “trashiness” as a condition of our times, of our society, of our way of producing and consuming, of designing and of manufacturing and building. We decided to take “trash” seriously, with mathematical rigour, digital precision and crafting care. This ambition drove the prototyping of the meta-Folly. Its manufacturing is a meticulous process of manipulation of multiple forms of cheap, mass produced, recycled and in some cases left over material.
In terms of fabrication and material technologies, such approach leads to a process of “slow-prototyping”, and the development of a dedicated “know-how” for gathering off the shelf and recycled bits and detailing their assemblage. Through the definition of
a system of transformations of found objects and manufactured connections between re-cycled parts we finally pieced the pavilion together. This “slow-prototyping” protocol was deployed in a month long workshop where a team of young architects turned digital craftsmen. This rewarding albeit laborious process cemented our belief that today there is no need for fast architecture, like there is no need of fast food. Rather we shall try to practice a form of “slow” architecture that operates like a swarm, or in the swarm, capable to convert a multitude of simple instructions into an emergent meta-language of forms, movements and effects.
A fibrous system wraps and supports meta-Folly. The system composed of steel rods is developed algorithmically as a collection of bundled minimal paths; the paths are the materialization of the trajectories of both structural loads and information travelling from each tile to the ground, all the way to the base of each of the 6 hubs. Minimal paths have been computed from each hub to all the tiles; the denser bundles are materialized by mean of bundled steel rod. There are 700 rods in the whole pavilion. Spatial proximity and speed of movement of visitors is sensed by meta-Folly and translated by its microprocessors into time delays to activate the sound loop of each one of the 300 piezo-buzzer. This simple mechanism is activated in time by multiple individuals creating an emergent complex behaviour of sound within the Folly. Each individual sound is of the simplest nature, however their interaction in time and space produces infinite sound inflections.
In the opening show at Archilab 9 the behaviour was set to mimic the one of a swarm of crickets in a field. When no interaction was present the speakers would loop in a random sequence. Human presence would increase looping time proportional to distance so that closer speakers would turn quiet for a longer time. Speed of movement would then determine the delay before the speaker would resume normal looping time.
custom designed pattern. The visitor then hears the response and acts accordingly; his/her reaction is then registered and fed back; the loop continues until no more visitors are within the sensitive zone or too many of them overload the system.
